This week, San Antonio children had the unique opportunity to ask a question to Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina to become a Supreme Court Justice, and have her answer face to face.
“How do you deal with your feelings,” read one of the questions submitted and signed by Oliver.
“Is that your question?” she asked the child as she approached him. “That’s a really good question.”
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“I try to show it but not at other people,” she replied. “Meaning when you’re mad, a lot of time you take it out on other people. And that’s wrong because most of the time they’re not at fault. And sometimes when they make us mad, they don’t mean to.”
Attendees filled the Carver Community Cultural Center Theater on Tuesday for the event, held by the local bookstore Nowhere with help from the San Antonio Book Festival, to promote Sotomayor’s new children’s book “Just Shine!” and “¡Solo Brilla!,” which was published last September.
Inspired by her mother, Cecilia, “Just Shine!” tells the story of a little girl who had a special power to bring out the best in people. In it, she pays tribute to her mother as the best teacher she ever had, but didn’t realize it until she was gone.
“Often, it takes a long time to appreciate who the best teacher is in our lives,” Sotomayor said. “I bet if I asked you before I started reading the book, who was your favorite teacher or who was your best teacher? Every single person said, ‘A school teacher.’ Nobody says, “My parents.’”
That evening Sotomayor was joined on stage by Carmen Tafolla, an acclaimed San Antonio writer who represented the city as the local Poet Laureate in 2012 and 2014, and at the state level in 2015.
Tafolla conducted a brief interview onstage before losing Sotomayor to the audience she was itching to embrace.
“What I enjoy most about writing books for kids I’m going to get when I go down to the audience in a few minutes, okay?” warned Sotomayor during the interview. “I get hugs from kids. And those hugs become my fuel to survive the work I do. Especially now.”
The new book is a continuation of “Just Ask!” and “Just Help!” all of which she has written in both English and Spanish, the first language Sotomayor spoke and one she continues to champion with her personal translations.
“I spend a lot of time on the translations and I have wonderful friends who work with me to make sure that they are exact translations,” Sotomayor said. “Not just in terms of the words, but in terms of the feelings of the world.”
Growing up in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City, she didn’t find many books for her in Spanish, at least not in her neighborhood or in her school she said.
“There’s a whole lot of kids out there like me who speak Spanish first,” Sotomayor said. “I want to make sure they have those books. And I’m using the power that I have as a famous person to negotiate in every contract with my publisher that my books will be published in both languages on the same day.”
As reported by the New York Times, over the years book deals have become one of the most lucrative sources of added income for serving Supreme Court Justices. For Sotomayor, her memoir titled “My Beloved World” and her children’s books have yielded her about $3.7 million.
Her Tuesday visit was the first publicly advertised visit to San Antonio since she visited the Texas A&M-San Antonio campus on Jan. 29, 2025. The appearance was part of the university’s Distinguished Lecture Series and closed to the media, including student media.
Sotomayor, who had a local high school named after her in 2022, captivated the audience during her presentation, and at some point protested that there were “too many adults in the room.”
This is the first of her children book that has yielded more letters from parents than children, she said. So she offered helpful advice for parents as the best teachers for children everywhere.
“Remember one thing. Everything good about kids comes from you. So does everything bad,” she said as the audience laughed. “So, when you’re seeing things you don’t like, the first question should be, what am I doing?”
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